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I always like when people say Twitter's lower reliability will drive people off the site. Reddit's been awful for more than a decade and people still use it.
by CoolGuySteve 4y ago
I always like when people say Twitter's lower reliability will drive people off the site.
Reddit's been awful for more than a decade and people still use it.
- rvz 4y agoIt is actually hilarious. People would rather wait for Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, etc to get back online than to sign up to another alternative social network. It means that the network effect is still present on the site such that it is not worth it for existing users to migrate and start from zero again to a lesser known platform with low discoverability or little to no activity. Especially one with a significantly weaker network effect. It would have to take more than just outages to damage the network effect of these social networks. Hence why alternatives like Mastodon, didn't take off as many here thought.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoIs there a service that matches my curated list of subjects as well as Reddit does?
- bombcar 4y agoReddit successfully killed most if not all web forums, and reigns supreme over that. Nothing even comes close; but some twitter/discord groups might be the beginning of the end.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoI don't understand either of those. With twitter there's no room for thought or nuance. It's just a basic "hot take" machine and that's it. Sure, Reddit is full of those, but there's some depth there too at times. I understand discord even less. When I look at it it seems like just a giant chat log. I can't easily find new insights from overnight without rewinding the whole log and parsing it all. I don't know how to pick and choose topics that interest me, it's a fire-hose of noise. I assume one can do it, but I can't figure it out.
- suddenclarity 4y agoI disagree about your view on Twitter. I'd even go as far as saying it's better than Reddit for nuance because going against the pack doesn't cause you to be downvoted into obscurity. It allows more than one view. It's great for interacting directly with the researcher that did an interesting study or the developer who released a new software. The common issue for all of the services are when they become mainstream. It attracts bad apples. Twitter used to be and still have some great interactions just like small subreddits do, but when a post reaches /r/all or the feed of a controversial celebrity, you know it's going to be awful. Discord is more like IRC used to be. It thrives in small communities of 30-50 people where you talk regularly and each topic has its own channel so regular chitchat doesn't drown out the interesting bits. It's more of a daily pub talk with your friends than finding a tutorial 10 years after it was written.
- bombcar 4y agoYeah they’re both quite far from a forum, but people often abuse them to be something similar. Nothing close to what Reddit has (or even hacker news)
- hot_gril 4y agoNot one that's widely used. I made something small where you only see links reposted by friends, so you can get stuff from all over the place, but only if it's filtered through a friend. Which is even more granular than Reddit's curation and also obviates the need for community moderators.
- swader999 4y agoI've found discord replaces some Reddit subs on my list now.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoHow do you consume it? I find it's like trying to read a chat log - very hard to seperate high quality signal from noise.
- swader999 4y agoThat's true, I'm a fast reader and I am probably on lower volume boards than you might be thinking of.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoWhen you come back after a day or two away do you start reading where you left off like a chat log?
- swader999 4y agoFor the topics that interest me I do. Some I just scroll a few new messages.
- msrenee 4y agoI've honestly gone to Facebook groups nowadays. I don't love the company, but it does seem to be one of the last places I can find fellow nerds of my specific niche interests.
- hot_gril 4y agoMastodon has two big problems. It's not just the network effect but also educating the users on how to use a federated social network. It's easy with a technical background to overestimate how easily people will understand that, let alone care about it. Here's mainstream news trying to get people onto Mastodon, and even this is in the "tech" section: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/mastodon-social-media-twitter-rcna56288 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/mastodon-social-media-twitter-r...
- 8note 4y agoA good client shouldnt make you care That's entirely a tech problem, rather than a people problem
- jrockway 4y agoI feel like Reddit is more read heavy and Twitter is more write heavy. If you're trying to read Reddit and it's down, you'll probably go read it some other time (/r/all doesn't change that frequently). If you're trying to tweet news or something, there is no way to do that when Twitter is down.
- 22289d 4y agoProbably just the way you use them? You Tweet and lurk Reddit? All user generated content is read heavy. Most people just lurk. Twitter publishing view counts is demonstrating this clearly. You'll get 3 likes, 2 comments, and 400 views.
- MatthiasPortzel 4y agoI agree with the sentiment I expect 10x as many reads as writes. Just thought I’d mention that Twitter’s exposed view count is not indicative of actual views from users. You can get hundred of views on a private account with a handful of followers.
- takeda 4y agoAre there any Twitter lurkers? I never created Twitter account and the only time I visit it is if there's some news article or someone mentions specific tweet in social media. From what I see, Twitter is just a tool for narcissists, and they absolutely need to write to exist.
- 22289d 4y agoCheck the view counts that they now publish. Every Tweet has orders of magnitude more views than likes, comments or retweets. Those are all of the lurkers.
- myspy 4y agoCanceling third party clients and the antics, as well as the bad management of Musk is what people drives away from Twitter not the reliability.
- kfrzcode 4y agoAnd yet, Twitter remains quite popular
- romwell 4y agoSo did digg.com for some time after the redesign.
- celticninja 4y agodigg.com, noe that's a name I haven't heard in a long time
- kfrzcode 4y agozombo.com !
- nla 4y agoI like to separate my politics from my technology.
- next_xibalba 4y agoHas Twitter’s usage declined? I’ve seen a lot of opinions like this but they seem to be motivated reasoning and/or summarization of the views of a small echo chamber, but not based on actual data. I would guess most users of social media (and products/services for that matter) are not too concerned with antics of the owners.
- chii 4y agoi've seen a wave of people looking to migrate to masterdon or some alternative, but those messages have slowed, and those who have "migrated" haven't stopped tweeting on twitter either. The network effect is real, so without substantial change, twitter is still the best platform for tweeting.
- random3 4y agoPerhaps people are too young or too old to remember the Fail Whale before Twitter got reliable =)
- _joel 4y agoDepends what you're using it for, I guess.
- 22289d 4y agoIt has actually gotten a lot better. Incremental progress for a few years and we're in a fairly good place. This is highly unusual.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago> It has actually gotten a lot better. Come on, almost every evening you get error pages. Yes they don't last more than a few refreshes, but it's simply ridiculous for a site as prominent as Reddit.
- OGWhales 4y agoI’ve never experienced that and use reddit far too much.
- iLoveOncall 4y agoWhen do you use it? Around 6-8PM GMT is prime time because both EU and US are active.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- phlakaton 4y agoNope.
- 22289d 4y ago> almost every evening you get error pages The only thing I do more than Reddit is sleep - and I do not get error pages everyday. A few years ago, yes. Now they are pretty rare. Maybe once a week.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago> The only thing I do more than Reddit is sleep No offense, but... you okay? How do you take care of your brain while doing something like that? It's hard for me to tear myself away fully from social media (behold this comment), but every time I do, I notice how my brain seems to just... work better.
- sharlos201068 4y agoReddit's reliability used to be much much worse than its early days. These days it's not perfect but far from awful.
- hot_gril 4y agoIt's still worse than Twitter's.
- paulpauper 4y agoIt's tempting to want to blame the admins or political bias...the main problem are the mods for individual subs. Too much domain and keyword filtering, arbitrary removals of content, algorithmic removals/filtering, etc. The whole point of moderating is to actually moderate, not remove stuff automatically all the time. Even content that gets up-voted and users like, will not uncommonly be removed for no reason. If they don't want to moderate, they should be removed by the admins and replaced by new moderators who will. The tendency as time goes on is for subs to become increasingly moderated and censored to the point of being useless.
- jlmorton 4y agoOne of the most interesting things about Reddit is how they’ve managed to grow Reddit, Inc to a few thousand employees, but everyone still refers to the company as “the admins,” as if it’s a rag tag community group, not a Twitter-sized company.
- gonzo41 4y agoWell every subreddit is run by a small group of despots. So I would expect that's who they are talking about in a sense.
- Eisenstein 4y agoNo, the 'admins' are people who work for reddit. 'Mods' are people who volunteer to work for reddit (the 'despots'). By the way, you should try modding a moderately large sub and see what you have to deal with. It is always easy to criticize until you are one having to do the work.
- gonzo41 4y agoI don't think people make that distinction in their lived felt experience. Mods == Reddit.
- 4y ago
- wutbrodo 4y agoHell, Twitter's reliability has been atrocious for a long time.
- bnralt 4y agoIt's interesting comparing the relatively calm discussion here to Reddit being down for hours (and still down as I type this) to the hyperbolic comments people were making about the death of Twitter when Twitter briefly had some issues the other day[1] (the site wasn't down but had some issues, and they were resolved in less than an hour). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35043433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35043433
- kredd 4y agoReddit isn't really used as "defacto source of breaking news". I mean, local subreddits and other things stiff get prompt information, but it doesn't get as much wide coverage as Twitter.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y agoWell it was for a while. Then they got someone killed during the whole Boston thing. So you know, theres that..
- Mojave3 4y agoWhat? They didn't get anyone killed.
- wlonkly 4y agoSunil Tripathi committed suicide, and while missing was named as one of the Boston bombers by a bunch of Reddit detectives leading to harrassment of his family, but I don't think the suicide was a result of being misidentified. I think that's where the GP's mistake originated, though, since there was a public misidentification of someone who committed suicide. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi
- marcellus23 4y agoReddit was never on the level of Twitter in terms of real-time news relevancy. Tweets are broadcast on television and used as sources for news stories constantly.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- serf 4y agoif you're the only one filling a void, people forgive a lot. reddit is the place at the moment for a lot of people, that affords them a lot of forgiveness.
- smcl 4y agoCorrect, reddit has been up and down pretty regularly and has had its own share of problems like the irritating web interface and the nagging to user their iOS/Android app. Twitter had a terrible time coping with growth in the 2010s and the "fail whale" became a bit of a meme, but that died down as they got a hold of how to handle hockey-stick growth. Suddenly we're seeing that a bit more frequently. Weird, that! It's interesting how this line has shifted after the layoffs from: 1. actually it'll be fine, they had too many staff. nothing will change. 2. actually it's broken because Twitter "1.0" sucks, is brittle and is unsustainable. we need to throw out their garbage code. 3. actually it's ok to have downtime, it worked for the guys who have a less than a quarter of the active users we do [0][1] who also have a year-on-year decline in users! I guess I'm gonna have to answer the "you just hate Twitter/Elon" thing - look I would've been happy if Twitter carried on as-is, even if Elon let his politically active pals back on the site again. But they dumped Tweetbot, I don't like Twitter's app, I found I liked Ivory + a bunch of people on Mastodon so :shrug: maybe Twitter isn't for me any more. No biggie. [0] - 237 million/day, https://www.statista.com/statistics/970920/monetizable-daily-active-twitter-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/970920/monetizable-daily... [1] - 50 million/day, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1324264/reddit-daily-active-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1324264/reddit-daily-act...